Sunday, May 2, 2010

The Dwimmermount campaign resumes this afternoon, after an unexpected hiatus (my wife was down with debilitating migraine last weekend), with the party trekking back from an unknown location in the wilderness to the city-state of Adamas. Since I'd only ever mapped out the immediate area around Dwimmermount, I needed a larger swath of wilderness quickly and decided to use the old school standby of the Outdoor Survival map.

Unfortunately, the map from the actual game is too large for me to use without the players seeing it (since this is unfamiliar wilderness to them). So I needed a smaller map I could keep hidden and have decided to use this one, created by Snorri of A Wizard in a Bottle.

I'm making some modifications to the map to better reflect some already-established details of the campaign, but, overall, this will do very nicely. The scale will be five miles per hex and I'll be using the OD&D rules for wilderness travel/encounters, ported over to Labyrinth Lord, in addition to some house rules of my own. I'll post these rules, along with a full report of today's session, later in the week, as usual.

The geology is there because it's from the map to one of the deadliest Avalon Hill games ever, designed to kill whole camping parties in a few in-game days or less. Outdoor Survival is likely more deadly than D&D.

http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/1511/outdoor-survival

I think the Bat in the Attic blog guy has a redrawn version very nicely done in his Wilderlands/generic map product not called Wilderlands map style but the scale or physical size may be too large for James' needs.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying it's bad. I'm just reacting to the information imparted by the map. There is clearly some pattern in this terrain - it looks designed: as a player that intrigues me, just as a notched old shield would, if the notches happened to look like a message carved in runes.

"The geology is there because it's from the map to one of the deadliest Avalon Hill games ever, designed to kill whole camping parties in a few in-game days or less. Outdoor Survival is likely more deadly than D&D."

I got Outdoor Survival a year or two back, and my friends fell in love with it. Possibly our favorite boardgame.

Games can teach the starkest of lessons; this one was intentionally designed that way. (It comes with a handbook of actual outdoors survival techniques.)

There is clearly some pattern in this terrain - it looks designed: as a player that intrigues me, just as a notched old shield would, if the notches happened to look like a message carved in runes.

Interestingly, I've been toying around with notions related to this but I don't want to say too much for fear of establishing things about my campaign world that hasn't yet come up in play.

That said, I actually wound up using a wilderness map that's a bit different than this one, in part because I didn't like the mountain ranges in the Outdoor Survival map -- but for rather different reasons.

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